Fears are growing that the offshore U.S. detention facilities at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba are an ominous sign for what President Donald Trump has in store as he further disregards the rule of law and normalizes actions that previously would have been unthinkable or faced immediate, bipartisan opposition in Congress.
After the first pictures emerged Saturday of still unidentified persons transferred to the island from the U.S. mainland by immigration officials, progressive journalist Nathan Robinson was among those raising the alarm, accusing Trump of "building a concentration camp and deliberately putting it where it is hardest to monitor or enforce the law."
The New York Times, alongside pictures of newly-erected tents taken by photojournalist Doug Mills, reported Saturday that the administration had already "moved more than 30 people described as Venezuelan gang members to the U.S. Navy base at Guantánamo Bay, as U.S. forces and homeland security staff prepare a tent city for potentially thousands of migrants." Mills was traveling Friday with Kristi Noem, the secretary of homeland security, as she made her first visit to the offshore site.
According to the outlet:
Ms. Noem visited the nascent tent camp, where the administration has suggested that thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, of migrants who pose lesser threats could be housed. She watched Marines rehearse how to move migrants to the future tent city, and she was shown a tent with cots and a display of basic items to be provided each new arrival — T-shirt, shorts, underwear and a towel — and then got an aerial view of the mission from a Chinook helicopter.
"The Trump administration," the Times reported, "has not released any of their identities, though they are believed to all be men, nor has it said how long they might be held at the island outpost."
According to critics like Robinson, "There's no reason to build this in Guantánamo unless you want to do things you don't think you could get away with on the U.S. mainland. It's easy to put tents in Florida. But they're putting them in Cuba. Ask yourself why."
On Friday, a coalition of more than a dozen rights groups—including the ACLU, National Immigration Law Center, and others—sent a letter today to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), Department of Defense (DoD), and the U.S. State Department demanding Trump officials provide immediate access to those who have been transferred out of the country to the offshore facility.
In addition, the groups demanded to know:
"Sending immigrants from the U.S. to Guantánamo and holding them incommunicado without access to counsel or the outside world opens a new shameful chapter in the history of this notorious prison," said ACLU deputy director of immigrant rights Lee Gelernt. "It is unlawful for our government to use Guantánamo as a legal black hole, yet that is exactly what the Trump administration is doing."
Setareh Ghandehari, advocacy director of Detention Watch Network, said Friday that expansion of operations at Guantánamo "is especially alarming given its remote location and the decades-long documented history of abuse and torture there, which will only be exacerbated by the well-documented abuse inherent to the ICE detention system, including abuse, unsanitary conditions, and medical neglect. In no uncertain terms—lives are in jeopardy."
While previous administrations have exploited the land seized by the U.S. in Cuba to detain and process asylum seekers and migrants in the past, those were individuals interdicted at sea or prior to having ever set foot on American soil. The facilities have not been used to hold noncitizens deported from the U.S. mainland.
Last week, Slate's Mary Harris interviewed journalist Andrea Pitzer, author of "One Long Night: A Global History of Concentration Camps," who acknowledged that while many immediately think of Nazi Germany's death camps under Adolf Hitler when they hear the term "concentration camp," it is not wrong to describe the U.S. prison facilities at Guantánamo that way and for important reasons.
In her questioning, Harris posed to Pitzer how the existence of Guantánamo "doesn’t mean it’s going to become Auschwitz" necessarily, but that it does make "the road to Auschwitz more possible."
And Pitzer responded:
That's exactly right. And so what it means is even to do the most horrible things that humans have done takes time. It takes sort of a space and imagination and tools and resources. And the more of those kinds of tools and resources we line up in one place, the more room there is for the obscene or the perverted imagination to work. And even Auschwitz—keep in mind that it was 1933 when Hitler came to power and they started with concentration camps right out of the gate. So within the first weeks, Dakau is opened, though not quite in its final form, but it is already a camp and it takes almost a decade to get to even this final solution. And so, yes, absolutely, the Holocaust as we know it, as we remember it, has never been repeated. Nothing has come close to that. But you do not get to the death camps without having several years of Auschwitz, of Buchenwalds, of those beforehand.
"And right now," Pitzer said of Gitmo's legacy and the new purpose that Trump is giving it, "we have a place where there has been torture, we have a place where there has been riots, we have a place where there have been people held without trial for more than 20 years. And those are some of the most dangerous seeds that humanity can plant."
"The Holocaust as we know it, as we remember it, has never been repeated. Nothing has come close to that. But you do not get to the death camps without having several years of Auschwitz, of Buchenwalds, of those beforehand."
In a weekend column, the Philadelphia Inquirer's Will Bunch warned that even as much of the Trump administration's targeting of immigrants and refugees thus far should be seen as a "propaganda" exercise designed to titillate his base and antagonize his liberal opponents, the danger present by the Gitmo policy and others are very real.
"The bigger worry, " writes Bunch, "is that just because the cruelty of mass deportation is largely performative doesn’t mean these performances won’t scale up dramatically in the months ahead. Trump reportedly is already badgering his border czar, Tom Homan, and ICE to meet ambitious arrest targets, which would probably require crueler and more legally dubious measures that would fill those empty tents at Gitmo. If the president needs his phony war against a nonexistent border invasion to distract the American heartland from the coming evisceration of government services, the cruelty will become a bigger and bigger point."
Referencing the great Russian playwright's famous quote about the introduction of a gun onstage, Bunch opined that Trump's performative brand of governance does not mean the threat isn't real.
"You don't need Anton Chekhov," noted Bunch, "to understand that you don't build empty tents at Gitmo in Act One of your presidency unless you plan to fill them in Act Three."
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